


I Have Spread My Dreams Under Your Feet

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Journalist Betty Cooper, Meet-Cute, The subway meet cute one, Writer Jughead Jones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23295415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Jughead sees Betty on the F train.  She is making a dream of his come true without even knowing it.Due to "circumstances" all I can write are stories where strangers meet and chat and even hold hands. So here is one of those.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 18
Kudos: 74





	I Have Spread My Dreams Under Your Feet

**Author's Note:**

> This poem by W.B. Yeats is mentioned in the story so I thought I’d put it here in case you don’t know it.
> 
> Aedh Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven
> 
> Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,  
> Enwrought with golden and silver light,  
> The blue and the dim and the dark cloths  
> Of night and light and the half-light;  
> I would spread the cloths under your feet:  
> But I, being poor, have only my dreams;  
> I have spread my dreams under your feet;  
> Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

So it looked like it was really going to happen. Right here on the F train. With the beautiful blonde who looked like the embodiment of his teenage idea of what a woman could be. He felt like he was back in the projection booth at the Twilight Drive In, holding a piece of film stock up the light, and she had simply stepped out of the black and white celluloid and into glorious three dimensional technicolour. “Don’t be such a creep Jones,” he reproached himself. It wasn’t the blonde ponytail that curled like the ribbon that a Fifth Avenue sales assistant ties on a gift that had made him notice her but now, sitting next to her, he had to admit that he didn’t mind it one bit. It shouldn’t matter to him that her skin was luminous even in the sickly light of the New York subway but it kind of did. Once he had taken the vacant seat next to her he’d been aware of her perfume. She smelt fresh, clean like his clothes when Archie’s mom had washed them for him at the point that she couldn’t stand how dirty he looked. When he had taken things to the laundromat himself there was always a miasma of damp that clung to everything but Mary Andrews put something special into the washer that made everything smell heartbreakingly like love and warmth. He tried to catch a glimpse of his reader out of the corner of his eye without perving on her like a total Weinstein. He couldn’t see the colour of her eyes but he could see that they were large and expressive with long lashes and finely arched brows. He glanced at her hands as she turned a page. Her fingers were strong, her nails filed short, unpainted, or perhaps with some kind of transparent gloss on them. He liked that. They looked like the kind of hands that could bake bread or fix a fuse. He couldn’t understand why some women grew their nails so long that they became incapable of doing anything for themselves; it seemed perverse. He discovered that he liked her for much more than the obvious reason that she held his soul in her hands. 

He tried to calm his racing heartbeat. He was acting like some over excited teenager who was about to come in his jeans because a pretty girl had smiled at him across the cafeteria; not that many pretty girls had ever even seen him, not when he was constantly eclipsed by the ginger Adonis that was Archie Andrews. Blinded by the sunshine of Andrews’ bonhomie, girls simply never noticed the dark silhouette that was Jughead’s skinny figure. So his experience with making easy conversation with beautiful women on subway trains was pretty limited. Consequently his palms were sweating and his breath was catching now that he was simply going to have to speak to the Hitchcock blonde. “You’re not some terrified virgin Jones. You can speak to a girl.” he told himself as he tried to summon his courage. Unfortunately all that he had done was remind himself of the terrible frat party that Archie had dragged him to and the girl from his non-linear narrative course. He hadn’t been able to understand why she kept staring at him even when he had nothing new to say about either Infinite Jest or Cloud Atlas. And why did she keep looking at his mouth? He was pretty sure there was nothing in his teeth but it was making him nervous and twitchy. Archie had dragged him to one side, taken him by the shoulders and said “She’s so into you dude. You have to ask to walk her back to her dorm. She’s about to make a man of you at long last.” Then he’d made some totally confusing sports metaphor about how the baserunner mustn’t overtake his teammate on his way to home and someone being out. He had only the loosest grasp of the rules of baseball but he gathered that it was a dick move for the guy to go all out for the home run and leave the girl back on first. So he was nervous, confused, struggling with an clunkingly inappropriate analogy and suffering horrific performance anxiety. He suspected that the experience had not rocked her world even if she had been kind about it to his face.

So now, having ramped up his nerves to an unsustainable level he started to doubt himself. What if she was hating his book? What if she found it tedious and predictable? Perhaps it would leave her unsatisfied, even bored? Did he really want to hear her say that? He wanted her to be breathless, turning each page in an agony of expectation and then, at last, to close the cover with a sigh and a moment of sadness that it had ended. Clearly that was completely unrealistic. If he couldn’t give a girl an orgasm in the conventional way it was pretty unlikely that he could write her to one. It felt like perhaps it would be better to just sit here in silence, not to pursue it, keep the fantasy intact. But he had dreamed of this moment. It was much more exciting to him than that unsatisfactory fumble in non linear narratives’ dorm room with a sock on the door handle and the desperate knowledge that he was simply clueless. He would have to try, at least. There was just no way that he could sit here, next to this beautiful girl, and not turn the fantasy into reality. Sometimes in his imagination it had happened in a park or at a sidewalk cafe table on a blossoming Spring day. Now he really thought about it, the rattling F train was perfect. It would be brief; they’d reach her station, she’d smile fondly, they’d say goodbye and it would be finished. A perfect memory, like a scene on 35mm, that he could revisit in his imagination forever. He couldn’t help but smile to himself when he realised that it would be this scene replaying in his mind when he couldn’t sleep at night rather than any of his romantic or erotic experiences, God knows there were few enough of them. And although this experience might happen to him again one day with someone else, this was the first time, so it would always be rich with nostalgia and sentiment, as long as he didn’t make a total fool of himself. 

He glanced down again. It was important to be certain. He couldn’t imagine the mortification he’d suffer if it were the wrong book. He was sure he’d glimpsed the cover as she took it from her bag, that’s why he’d taken the vacant seat next to her when normally he would have stood. He loved that cover. The dust jacket had a matte grey finish and the title was in a trippy art nouveau font that felt like a laudanum fever dream. It was the right book. His book. She was keen; a hardback copy that had only been out for a week and she’d almost finished it. Surely she’d have given up by now if she hadn’t felt something. Time to man up or her station would appear and he’d have missed his chance.

“Are you enjoying it?” The words were out before he’d had time to think them through. He realised to his mortification that they were the same ones he muttered to non linear when they should both have been in the throes of passion but he’d feared that both of them were just trying to get through it without too much fuss. He nodded at the book as her green eyes met his. So they were green then, fathomless green.

He would have thought that she’d be concerned that she was being accosted by a subway lunatic or some pervert who was about to start rubbing against her but she seemed calm, almost as though she was expecting him to speak to her, so he carried on. “Sorry, it’s just…I know the writer.” He was flustered now. Would she move away from him, sit somewhere else, think he was hitting on her? Was he, in fact, hitting on her? He nervously pushed his hair back from his eyes and met her glance, trying to look at her in a non-predatory way, whatever that was.

“What, this writer? Forsythe Jones? Wow. What’s he like?” She sounded amused despite the New York social norm being self containment to the point of hostility.

“Oh, just a normal guy. Mid twenties. Loner. Misanthrope. New Yorker.” 

She shook her head. “Oh, I guess you don’t know him very well then. It’s just obvious from the way he writes his characters that he loves people. Have you read the first one, “Beat the Champ”?” Jughead nodded, not sure how he was going to get out of this conversational minefield now he’d started across it in a ridiculous disguise. “Right so, the boxer in that. He’s, frankly, a little dumb. He’s impulsive and reckless but yet as a reader you just fall in love with him. Jones must be in love with him. There’s a lot of description of his abs isn’t there? Is Jones gay? Definitely gay, right?”

“No, not gay.” He wanted to be emphatic without sounding like some Vice Presidential asshat about it. That’s a tough tone to find and he was worried he might have over-Penced it in his enthusiasm to alert her to his heterosexuality. “And you’re being rough on Artie. He’s loyal and courageous and unbelievably generous. Who wouldn’t love him?” Jug was feeling a little defensive now.

“No, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. I love him too. Jones writes him so that even though you see his faults you forgive him anything. If someone writes like that they love people. And in this one,” she flipped the cover of “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” to make her point, “the main guy is a loner but that’s just a defence isn’t it? He’s too raw to let people get too close. I’m a little bit in love with him too, despite the self absorbed pretentiousness.” Jughead felt a sudden urge to hug her which he had to quell by untying and retying a bootlace that had been perfectly well fastened. He felt like she was a kind of human X-ray machine, showing his emotional skeleton to the whole car of the F train. It was all too intense, especially when he knew that it was about to be over. He thought about that frat party night again, the feeling that an express train was rushing towards him too fast to stop but trying to hold it off so that the girl could get on board too. Non-linear narrative had put on a good show of it but he suspected that he’d left her standing on the metaphorical platform anyway. Now here was this moment, this woman who had read his book and really seen him and in a moment or two it would be over without him having the time to really experience it. 

Out of nowhere she giggled. The sound was a shock because she had been so intense a moment before. “I’m sorry Forsythe, I’m teasing you a little. I’m Betty Cooper. I reviewed “Beat the Champ” for Equinox. And also…” she flipped open the flyleaf of her copy of “Lovecraft” to reveal his own signature in Sharpie. “You signed this for me last week at the reading you did at the Rizzoli.”

Jug stared at her for a moment unable to grasp that he had signed a book for this incredible woman and didn’t remember her. “I’m so sorry. I…”

“Oh no, it’s OK. You seemed a little frazzled. There was a girl with you telling you to hurry, something about wedding cake?” She was holding out a hand and he just stared at it, like she’d offered him a porcupine, unable to process anything that was happening. “Oh, not a handshaker?” She said and moved to withdraw the hand before he rushed to grab it and hold it with both of his.

“No, I am, I am a shaker. Sorry. Oh look, let me explain, it’s a little embarrassing actually. I’ve had this dream for years that one day, somewhere, I’ll see someone reading something that I’ve written and I’ll be able to tell them that I’m the writer and well, I guess that’s where the dream normally ends. Now it’s actually happened I’m kind of losing my mind. Thank you so much. Oh and I go by Jughead. Forsythe is just for book covers.”

‘“Wow, Jughead? So, Jughead, you’re saying that I’m making your dream come true right now? Just by sitting here reading your book? Don’t worry I’ll tread softly. Anyway I’m actually glad to get the chance to talk. I was a little disappointed at the reading, I’ll admit. I’d hoped to tell you in person how much I enjoyed “Champ”, and the piece you wrote in the New Yorker about small town Americana. But of course your wedding takes priority. Congratulations by the way.”

“What? No, oh no! My friends are getting married. I’m the best man. Veronica, she’s the bride, needed me to go and taste cake with her because her intended exists entirely on grilled chicken and steamed veggies so desert is not his area but for some reason she thinks I know cake. I would have loved to have chatted at the Rizzoli. I’m rambling. Sorry.” He looked down only to realise to his mortification that he still held her capable, beautiful hand in both of his. He let go immediately and, just for a moment, he thought that maybe, fleetingly, she looked at him at little like non-linear narrative had looked at him in that frat house. “I love “enwrought” in that poem by the way, don’t you?” he offered glancing at her through the unruly lock of black hair that he always allowed to fall across his eyes when he was feeling vulnerable.

She smiled and her hand twitched towards him as if to push away the hank of hair but she pulled it back into her lap. “I should have guessed that the writer wouldn’t just let the Yeats reference pass. I like “the blue and the dim and the dark cloths”; I’m just a fool for that anapaest.” He couldn’t hide the smile that spread across his face. All this and she knew her Yeats. He thought it might be love. She mirrored the smile, clearly pleased that they were in the same literary wheelhouse.

As the F train rumbled onwards they swapped their favourite lines by Yeats and Dylan Thomas and Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton like an exchange of caresses until finally he quoted Whitman “We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other” and she laughed. 

“That’s not subtle Jones. You could just ask a girl out for a drink you know.” He flushed scarlet with embarrassment but she followed her laughter with a serious look and a raised eyebrow so he took courage.

“Betty, would you like to get a drink with me?”

She grinned back at him. At that moment there was a grinding screech from beneath the train as the brake was applied and they slid into the station at 14th Street and 6th. “C’mon,” she said holding out a hand, “We haven’t even started on Shakespeare.”


End file.
